


Remembrance

by amylaura



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, One Shot, Post-Reichenbach, Remembrance Day
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-17
Updated: 2014-11-17
Packaged: 2018-02-25 17:25:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2630099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amylaura/pseuds/amylaura
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock is abroad, hunting Moriarty's men, when he finds something unexpected in his bag.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Remembrance

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I own none of the characters in this story.

Sherlock cursed as he dug his hand deep into the depths of his duffle bag. Somewhere in here was the lock picking tool that he needed for tonight. Without it, he was really in trouble. This stage of the mission depended on him entering a nondescript office block on the outskirts of town undetected. That office was one of the vital clogs in a vast money laundering operation that funded most of Moriarty’s network. But without that set of lock picks, he had no chance of sabotaging it.

Suddenly, Sherlock froze, his brow wrinkling in confusion as his fingers brushed against something that made out of paper deep in one of the side pockets. He couldn't remember putting anything there recently. It crinkled slightly as his fingers wrapped around it and after a second he pulled it out. His breath caught in his chest as he realized what he was looking at.

It was the small poppy pin that John had bought him, just about a year ago.

Sherlock sank onto the narrow bed behind him, the small paper pin fluttering as his fingers began to shake. He didn’t know how this came to be in his bag; he suspected it was Anthea's doing. Just before that final rooftop confrontation, she had gone into Baker Street while he and John had been out to gather a few of his personal possessions that he would need while he was away; she had grabbed nothing that John would notice missing, of course. This pin had been on the top of his bureau in his room, where he had thrown it months before his departure.

John had bought two of these pins towards the end of October last year and had presented one of them to Sherlock, a hesitant smile on his face. He had obviously expected Sherlock to say thank you and put it on. Most people, after all, would never dare to refuse wearing a memorial poppy. But he had taken one look at the small paper pin and launched into one of his most-used lectures. The poppy pins, he explained haughtily, weren't a symbol of remembrance of fallen soldiers as much as a tool for political and ideological conformity. They had become little more than a seasonal fashion accessory instead of as a symbol of those who been lost. He had gone on to detail the increasing pressure on people to wear them, not because they believed in the original meaning behind the pin but because if they failed to wear one, others assumed that they lacked empathy or moral character. 

Sherlock had looked up into John’s face at that point, and for the first time in living memory, forgotten what he had been saying. John’s face had turned that particular shade of red that Sherlock had learned meant that he had gone too far. At that point, he had averted his eyes, pretending to study the experiment on the table; he wasn't going to change his mind and wear the pin, but that didn't mean he was comfortable knowing that he had caused his only friend a great deal of pain. John had slammed the pin down on the table next to Sherlock and stormed out of the flat. Sherlock had sat frozen at the table for more than an hour, his experiment forgotten, listening to the echo of John’s pain. Finally, he had delicately picked up the pin and carried it into his bedroom. He hadn't been able to bring himself to throw it away, even if he would never cave and wear it.

A noise in the hallway brought Sherlock back to the present. He looked around the dingy bedsit he was using as a base, thousands of miles from London and John. For the first time, he understood the desire to wear something as a memento of someone else. He also understood, to at least a small degree now, the look that had come over John's face anytime he had described fallen comrades. Two months ago, Sherlock had been caught in a gunfight while pulling apart a drug trafficking operation in the Czech Republic. One minute, the agent next to him had been shouting orders, the next he had been on the ground, blood pouring from the sizable wound on the side of his face. 

Sherlock was haunted by that scene, though not because it could have easily been him with the fatal wound. He had fully understood the risks of this mission before he had left London. There was a high probability that he wouldn't ever make it back to Baker Street, but the safety of his friends was worth that risk. It also wasn't that someone he had been working to bring down a portion of the spider’s web had been killed next to him. He couldn't even remember the agent’s name, and the other man had to have known the risks of getting involved in international espionage.

What haunted Sherlock was a mental image he couldn't shake, no matter how hard he tried. He kept seeing John, lying in the desert with blood pouring out of his shoulder. In his nightmares, John always ended up dying from that wound, instead of surviving with a starburst scar on the back of his shoulder. At that point, almost every night, Sherlock would wake up, drenched in a cold sweat and shaking from head to toe. He hated to think of how different his life would have been if John had died in Afghanistan.

Sherlock barely remembered the cold, distant man he had been two years ago, before Mike Stamford had led a limping former soldier into the lab at Barts. John had been interesting enough a first glance, enough of a conundrum to peak Sherlock’s interest; he was a doctor who had gone to war, after all. That next night, though, when that first “amazing” had slipped through his lips, Sherlock had realized that he might have met someone who would see him as being more than just a freak or a machine. From that moment on, he had been fascinated by the other man, even to the point of allowing himself to care about another human being for the first time since his reckless university days.

The paper flower turned over in his fingers absently as a glance at his mental calendar showed it was early November; tomorrow, back home, it would be Remembrance Sunday. Without conscious thought, Sherlock moved over to the cracked mirror hanging in the corner. After a moment studying his face, tense and lined from months of undercover work with no end in sight, he came to a decision. He still wouldn't wear the pin in remembrance of the faceless soldiers who had died in the past; instead, he would wear it in honor of the one soldier he knew who hadn't given his life in the quest to serve and protect.

He would proudly wear it for John Watson, the only soldier who mattered to Sherlock Holmes.

**Author's Note:**

> This thought popped into my head on Veteran's Day when I was looking at the photos from the Veteran's Day/Armistice Day events from around the world. 
> 
> I'm not British, so I've never seen a poppy pin in person; I've only seen photographs. I apologize if I'm messed up any of the details. Sherlock's initial objections to the pin come from reading about some of the controversies associated with it online, as well as some of the reactions I've seen here in the States to politicians who don't wear flag pins at every public event they go to.
> 
> This fic has not been beta'd or britpicked. All feedback is welcome!


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